John Adair's 100 Greatest Ideas for Smart Decision Making

Idea 71: The holistic mind at work

In 1927 Field Marshal Jan Smuts, a keen agricultural scientist as well as a soldier and statesman, published a book entitled Holism and Evolution. Holism was the word he coined to describe the tendency in nature to produce wholes by ordering or grouping various units together.

The essential realities in nature, so Smuts wrote, are these irreducible wholes. They cannot be analyzed into their parts without losing this holistic quality. His neologisms – holism and holistic – subsequently entered the English language.

Anybody who has responsibility for the affairs of an organization, whether their title is chief executive, general manager, president or managing director, has to take a holistic view of it. Indeed, ...